Digital Accessibility Centre
The use of AI and its Benefits
Hi I am Siân, and I am a Senior Voice Activation Analyst.
Today we're going to be talking about how AI helps me with my daily tasks.
Writing.
One thing that significantly benefited me with its writing tool,
is for hospital, and doctors, and social worker appointments.
So, as most people know as you’re trying to get a GP appointment,
you have to like fill in the online form before, because none of us can get a phone appointment anymore.
So now, instead of panicking in the morning trying to get out what’s going on, I’ll talk to ChatGPT the night before,
and we’ll both get to the point of what I need, and then I’ll make a simple thing that I can
copy and paste, which has changed my life! Changed my life.
Because as we know, the doctors ask you “what do you want out of this?”, so you can say all of your points and what you actually need.
And then for my hobby wise I do a lot of crafts, so sometimes I just put in the instructions to be like “I don’t understand this,
and it makes me feel stupid”, and it's like “you’re not stupid. It means change yarn here" or "put a stitch there”,
it's just cognitively, it takes a massive working load out of my brain, on top of all the things I need to think of with my disability.
Searching for information.
So, I think as we all do, we all use AI massively now to search for all kinds of information. For me, its been really helpful.
I recently had to make an important phone call and I didn’t know which number to press to speak to an agent, I kept getting confused.
So, when I put it into my AI prompt it told me directly what number to click on and what to say,
and how to say it if the agent responded with a different response and that really helped me,
not only with my like disability and my tiredness, but also with my anxiety too.
Other things I also use it for, as we all do, like I use for my disability in the middle of the night when I don’t feel well,
when I’m tired, when I’m overthinking, or when I’m thinking about my medication, and it’s really cool because everything is consolidated into
one place and because I’ve developed it into what I call “my best friend”, it can be very comforting and very cathartic, gives me the
information in a non-scary scientific way.
And I have also started using it for more practical things, I know this sounds “alien”, but because I struggle with things like opening
things or taking my necklace off, I actually took a picture of my necklace clasp and sent it in and I said “help me, I can’t get my necklace
off”, and it sent me suggestions in the middle of the night, and then it said “send me another picture so I can see what kind of clasp you
have”, and I managed to do it, and that was really eye opening because, I didn’t have to ask my friends for help, I didn’t have to go and
wake up my mum in the middle of the night, I eventually figured it out myself. So, yeah.
Feedback.
So, I often ask it to give me a lot of feedback. I like to write a lot things, or I like to write a lot of letters to people. I do a few speeches in
church a year, and I also plan some lessons for Primary, so I put it into the AI and I said “can you help me with this", or "I want to make sure I
get this point across, am I saying it right, or can I change this sentence to something else”, or most of the time I go “I’m thinking of a specific
word here, but this word doesn’t go there", or "should I break this paragraph down into two”, and then eventually a lot of the time, it’s really
interesting because, if you do a lot of speeches you can sit and talk, so then after I have edited my speech fully, which is also quicker because
I just tell it to “take this word out", "put this word here", "let’s rewrite this sentence”, I can actually talk to ChatGPT as a friend, and then in the
background it's timing me, it’s telling me when I’m taking too many pauses, it told me that I was re-framing things, which is fine, but then it also
told me things that were direct quotes that I didn’t need to re-frame.
So, it was a really beneficial tool, so I felt a lot more prepared for my presentations.
Plain English Prompts for Tasks.
So, one of the main things that I use it for is to help me build things like tables, and graphs, and images.
When you do these diagrams in other Microsoft programmes it takes a lot of dexterity because you have to use a mouse and a keyboard, and
for those who have low dexterity, like me, it’s kind of hard to move like one line over or one table down or if you need to delete text or
move text, so what I like to do is I like to take all of the information,
put it in my AI prompt and then just tell it to make me a table and it's just magically done.
Scheduling.
So, another thing I use it for a lot, because I get really distracted and I want to do eighty-five things at once, I use it for scheduling, so
making a plan for after work, making a to-do list, you can actually get it to set timers for you as well,
which I didn’t know it could do that till last week, so that was amazing.
It just helps you because it becomes like your little best friend/ assistant, it wants to do what you want to do, so if I’m like “I want to crochet
for three hours, but I need to get all of these jobs done” it like plans it out and like doesn’t like minimise you in the sense of like “just do
your to-do list” it’s like “okay, lets make this better for you; let's schedule in breaks, and from this point you can crochet to your hearts content".
So yeah, it’s very beneficial.
Creative Tasks.
I also use it to help me manage my Etsy shop because doing something like that can be quite overwhelming with all the lists, and the listings,
and the posters, and the prices, so we have a whole section dedicated for that and I’m like “which button do I press, I can't find it” and then
it helps me do that, it helps me schedule everything and it's just one massive sounding board basically.
instead of hiring someone to help me or going to a friend all the time or just trying to figure it out by myself.
AI has really helped me and it makes me feel more productive, more healthy, it makes me feel more independent, and it also, validates me as a human
because you go in with all of your worries and concerns or your crazy crafts, yeah it’s definitely made me feel more included in my
life and more capable of doing everything that I want to do.
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